MENGLA, China - Under most circumstances, I would invite the two young and attractive Austrians out for a Tsingdao or a couple pieces of fried tofu. But I needed an ATM and then had to get to the hospital.
Zack's still sick. His symptoms include fever, headache, body chills, body sweats, difficulty breathing and a pain in his right foot. We took a rest day in Luang Prabang and then another here in Mengla, but he doesn't feel any better. As Mengla has no airport and Zach really didn't want to begin the six hour bus ride to Jinghong, the nearest city with one, that meant when Zach felt even worse during the evening, we paid a visit to Mengla Country Hospital.
We never found an ATM, and went to the hospital with 300 RMB between us. That's about $40, or $460 less than required to walk in the door in an American hospital. Of course American hospitals treat and then send the massive bill through a collection agency several weeks later. Here in China you pay for the treatment even before you receive it.
Mengla County Hospital is three buildings arranged in an open square. Two are built in a Southeast Asian style, concrete boxes with pointy roofs and a yellow paint job to show they are from Yunnan Province. The other was two story and brick, and this is where the taxi dropped Zach and I off.
My Chinese is better than Zach's, and with his illness he was talking less coherently than normal, so I did most of the talking. I explained to the nurse on duty that he'd been sick for a few days, feeling worse and want to know what was wrong.
The nurse took a thermometer out of a metal box, filled with disinfectant I hope, and stuck it under his armpit. One-hundred and four degrees: Not too good. His blood pressure and breathing tests came back fine, but they took one look under his foot and sent him to the dressing unit.
The story of Zach's foot wound is this: on our second day in Vang Vieng, the same day our tuk-tuk crashed, Zach, myself and the Australian-New Zealand duo of Chris and Veronica decided to celebrate our good fortune in emerging from the accident uninjured by drinking ourselves silly. On the Vang Vieng are a series of riverside bars, where tubers can stop and enjoy a $1 Beer Lao, $1.50 plate of noodles or a $1 joint, and then help themselves to unlimited jumps on a high rope swing. This sounds incredibly dangerous, but only a couple people have died in the last five years on this river. Given the drunk, high debauchery that occurs everyday here, that's a minor miracle.
Anyway Zach didn't injure his foot by going head long into the river or passing out from too many Beer Laos. He scraped his foot in the most mundane way, on a rock in the river, walking back to the shore after a jump. It looked a normal cut, a few inches across, red, but after a week it hadn't healed. Zach changed the bandage daily and started applying liberal doses of First Aid cream, but it still looked white and pussy when the Mengla nurse opened it up.
The surgery room was disgusting. Zach sat on an operating table covered in a cloth with several blood stains. A large spider crawled around the closest wall. The surgeon, who spoke no English, wore a dirty coat. First came the infection test, a few drops of blood drawn from the finger with an incredibly long needle. Then the surgeon cleaned, cut and dressed the wound, all while Zach winced in the pain of hydrogen peroxide.
Before any of this began, I was dispatched to the payment counter and ordered to pay $3.40 for the wound care and blood test. Only then did the treatment commence.
The blood test came back normal - no infection - and the surgeon sent us to the brick building. There I talked with the nurses about what we should do now. They wanted to know how Zach felt, when we were returning to Beijing, and how I spoke Chinese so well. I waved this off, as there's scarcely been a less appropriate time for faux-flattery then here at the hospital. They decided to administer a couple intravenous medications, and dispatched me to the pharmacy to pay and collect them. They came to $7.50, and I had to be careful with the small glass bottles as I carried them between the buildings.
They put Zach in Room 101, perhaps the best room at the hospital. There were two beds, and the man in the next bed didn't look well. He grasped in stomach and shook his head when I said hello. I think he needed an appendectomy. Later his son came to visit and the nurses hooked him to some kind of pump and he felt better.
The room had bad fluorescent lights but cable. For two hours, Zach watched a CCTV-9 documentary about children trying to escape the Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese War (or the War to Prevent Japanese Aggression as the government puts it) and slept. It was after midnight by the time we walked back to our hotel room, through dark streets and a beer garden.
Zach looked better after his visit to the hospital, at discharge his fever was only 99 degrees and his headache had gone down. The Chinese staff had been prompt and friendly in servicing us, obviously favoring us over other patients. They ran a number of tests and administered themselves in a professional manner, except when they bothered me about my Chinese skills. The total costs were just over $10 - essentially nothing. But Mengla is no place for a serious illness. I wouldn't want to go under the knife on that bloody table, or have one my internal organs explode while hooked to that strange pipe.
Our visit to the Chinese health care system was informative, but next time I'd rather not have the health of a friend be at stake.
